Inside YAPC::NA 2005

The Perl Foundation
organizes and holds several community-based Perl conferences each year. This
year's North American conference, YAPC::NA
2005 is in Toronto, Canada, June 27-29. chromatic recently
interviewed Richard Dice, organizer of the conference this year, to discuss his
plans and experiences.

Can you tell our readers a little bit about yourself?

Richard Dice: Richard's just this guy, see?

I'm 32, born in Montreal and grew up in the sleepy southern Ontario city of
London, Ontario. I did my undergrad degree in astronomy and applied
mathematics at the University of Western Ontario. I moved to The Big Smoke
(Toronto) in 1996 and have lived here (with brief stints in Montreal again and
in Waterloo, ON) since then. I finished my MBA at the University of Toronto
about a year ago, and I have recently started a job as a senior IT consultant
at a company in Toronto called Information Balance. I've been married for not
quite 2 years now, and we're soon to be moving into our first house. (The day
after YAPC! Ugh!)

I've been a Unix-head since 1992 and a Linux guy since 1994, which is around
the same time that I started programming in Perl, coming to it from C. (The
first Perl program I ever wrote took 45 minutes. To do the same in C would
have taken me three days. I never looked back.)

I have a love of good beer and scotch (and know everywhere in
Toronto to get both), overestimate my ability to speak French, have an
ever-growing personal library that my wife laments, and I go to all the good
raves in the city. (I get in to most of the after-parties, too.)

Also, I'm a cat person.

How did you decide that not only did you want someone to host a
YAPC in Toronto, but that you were the one to write the proposal and organize
things?

RD: I blame Damian.

Damian Conway is a professor of computer science at Monash University in
Melbourne, Australia, a Perl programmer par excellence, and an amazing public
speaker. In the latter half of 2000, Yet Another Society (also known as The
Perl Foundation) raised money to "buy" Damian for the year 2001, releasing him
from his professorial duties at Monash and tasking him in part to tour the
world speaking about Perl. (The Perl 6 announcement had just recently been
made at the time and it was thought that he would make an excellent
"champion" of the cause.)

In early 2001, I was in the process of moving from Montreal to Toronto when
I noticed that there was a small gap in Damian's tour schedule in June. I had
seen him the year before at YAPC 19100 in Pittsburgh and thought he was simply
amazing. I wanted to support his mission to evangelize Perl. So I wrote him
an email, introduced myself, and asked him to come to Toronto to present a few
free public talks on Perl. I didn't want for him to say no, so in order to
help make the decision easier I told him I'd make it all expenses paid. He
quickly replied to say yes. Then, I wrote the Toronto Perl Monger (TPM)
mailing list (which had never heard of me before this) and asked for help with
fundraising to bring Damian to Toronto. It took some doing on my part,
but in the end Damian's trip was completely covered and I didn't have to
back-stop it. Not only was the trip a success financially, but everyone
really seemed to enjoy the experience. This was my introduction to the
Toronto Perl Mongers, to Damian, and to the wide world of Perl community
organization.

Just before he left Toronto, Damian suggested that I consider organizing the
same for him during his North American summer tour in 2002. How could I say
no? Only this time, with a year to plan things, I could turn it from a small
event into Damian-pooloza. Spread out over a week in June 2002 he presented three
talks, each with around 250 people in attendance. The budget was also an
order of magnitude greater than what I raised the year before. That was when
some people locally (and Damian) started suggesting to me that I organize a
YAPC in Toronto. I cringed, because I had known the suggestion was going to
be raised eventually, and because I knew how much work it would be. But I
also knew that, again, there was no way I could say no.

In the summer of 2003 I organized TPM to put together a bid for
YAPC::NA 2004, which lost to the Buffalo bid (as judged by The Perl
Foundation). And I'm glad that it did! The Buffalo team did a great
job, and it just spurred us on to try even harder for our 2005 bid,
which we won.

You offered to fund Damian's trip to Toronto without having things lined
up first?

RD: That's correct. People are often surprised when I
mention this aspect of things.

Is that confidence or something else?

RD: Some of it is confidence, but only part of it would be
confidence in myself. (Though certainly I've been accused of this more than
once.) The other part is confidence in the Perl community, its generosity and
its ability to recognize when something good (e.g. a Damian Conway series of
talks) is about to happen.

When I first hatched the scheme to bring Damian to Toronto in my head, I
realized that it had all the makings for an organizational race condition.
That is, if I went to Damian telling him that we would like him to come to
Toronto conditional on funding being found, then he'd say "Great! Get back to
me when you've got the funding and I'll make my plans." And then I'd turn to
the Toronto Perl community to ask for funding to bring Damian to Toronto, and
the reply I'd get would be "I'd love to donate! Tell me when Damian is
confirmed and I'll contribute something." That's the kind of situation that
just eats planning time away until it's all gone. To break this vicious
cycle before it even started I decided to guarantee the funds myself. It
worked. There were risks, but the potential rewards were too great not to
make the effort.

I think that whatever support Damian showed for Toronto would have come
from his experience in seeing us "pull out all the stops" when we invited him
to Toronto in the past. I guess he had confidence in us to do the same, but
for hundreds of people this time and not just him.

What's the process of putting together the budget like? I'm not
looking for specific details and secrets, just some idea of what goes
into organizing a conference.

RD: The budget is everything. The Perl Foundation isn't
some huge organization with bottomless pits of money--YAPC has to stand on
its own, financially at least. I never allowed myself to plan a budget where
I wasn't 99.9% sure that no losses would occur. On the other hand, I didn't
want to have a conference that was so skimpy on goodies that people would be
talking to each other years from now saying things like, "Remember YAPC in
Toronto? That just sucked!"

This made for a rather iterative process. The conference budget was
designed "modularly", so as I identified more funding I could add on to the
conference. The original budgetary pass at the conference did look pretty
sucky. It wouldn't lose any money, but it would only barely make the YAPC
grade, too. So then the effort shifted over to finding corporate
sponsorships. This was a lot of hard work, but it has been entirely
worthwhile. We have had a lot of excellent people and companies support the
conference well beyond the call of duty. (Please visit the sponsors page on
the YAPC::NA web site to see what I mean and who I'm talking about.)

The other main point regarding the budgetary process is that I didn't do it
alone. Eric Bower, one of the Toronto Mongers, stepped forward to create the
budgetary spreadsheet models that he and I consulted (and still consult)
regularly. The latest iteration of this process has so many smarts built
in to it that I wonder sometimes if I could just step away from planning the
conference from here on in and let the spreadsheet take care of things by
itself. :-)

In the past couple of years, I've heard that there's more collaboration
between YAPC organizers than before. (Jeff Bisbee talked about this quite a
bit after the YAPC::2003 in Florida.) Is there a community of burned-out
ex-organizers that still work together?

RD: The first rule of YAPC ex-organizer club is you do not
talk about YAPC ex-organizer club.

Seeing as how I just broke the first rule, I may as well spill the beans
entirely.

The majority of the contact I have with the ex-organizers is with Kevin
Meltzer (YAPC:NA 2003 in Boca Raton, FL, alongside Jeff Bisbee) and Jim Brandt
(YAPC::NA 2004 in Buffalo). Jeff and Kevin glommed themselves onto The Perl
Foundation to act as the core of the Conferences Committee, and Jim is just a
generally accessible nice guy who can't hide from me, as I've got him on AIM.
I've had a few emails with Sarah Burcham (YAPC::NA 2002 in St.
Louis) and Rich Lafferty (YAPC::NA 2001 in Montreal) but nothing major.

In addition to the YAPC organizers of previous years, I have been in a great
deal of contact with Allison Randal, president of The Perl Foundation, and
Kurt DeMaagd, treasurer and general "boy Friday" of The Perl Foundation. He's
the unsung hero in all of this as far as I can tell.

Truth be told, even if the previous YAPC organizers were incredibly tight
and available to me, I'm not sure what I would be able to do with the "wisdom
of the past" they could offer. They might be able to give me a sense of what
needs to be accomplished and by what T-minus-YAPC date, and maybe they could
give me some leads in terms of corporate sponsorship, but these things really
aren't the bottleneck. The early bottleneck for the conference this year has
been money and making a budget for the conference that works. Doing that took
so much time that things we would have liked to do sooner had to wait too long
for my liking. (For example, opening up attendee registration.) The current
bottleneck is finding people who can look after task implementation details on
the ground here in Toronto. For that, I work with my local TPM members.

How does organizing a conference compare to organizing a software
project?

RD: That's a really interesting question. I hadn't
considered this before, but I can posit a few possibilities.

First, I want to make a distinction between types of software projects:
commercial and open source. I think these two types have quite different
organizational characteristics. Organizing a YAPC is more like organizing an
open source software project, but it has elements of commercial organization,
too.

The open source software aspect of YAPC organizing is that everyone
involved is a volunteer. I can only get people to move in the needed
direction by setting an example, moral suasion, persuasion, and by being the
obvious best person to make decisions and lead the group. That said, I can't
make anybody do anything they don't want to. Even if I was ostensibly
"successful" in talking someone into something they were reluctant to do, the
end result is that they wouldn't put in enough time and wouldn't do a good
enough job. I have to be very sensitive to finding the right people to do the
right things.

Fortunately, it's not like I'm trying to make an organization that sells
widgets. I'm running a YAPC, which is an intrinsically interesting and
exciting thing. There are lots of people in TPM who want to help out and are
willing to put in entirely unreasonable amounts of time and effort to make it
a great conference. What I have to do is provide a structure in which they
can be effective, and in which they can feel like they're being effective.
I'm very grateful to all the people in TPM who have helped out so much so far,
and I know that this help will continue (and accelerate, even!) going from
here all the way to the conference, which should be most excellent as
a result of all this energy and planning. (The speakers must be commended,
too; they're all volunteers who help out YAPC as well, even if they do it in
a different way.)

The commercial software project aspect of things is that YAPC has a
deadline, and it has a budget, and people are charged money to attend (not a
lot, but still it makes for a different dynamic). There is no "release early,
release often" aspect of YAPC. There is no "we'll only release it when it's
ready" aspect. These constraints drive the process.

I've heard rumors that you have some new events planned. What's this
about a scavenger hunt? How about the hackathon beforehand?

RD: You are well-connected to the rumor mill, I see.

The scavenger hunt actually originated with Kevin Meltzer. He and I were
chatting on AIM one day and he suggested it to me, seemingly out of the blue.
I guess what happened was he got interested in seeing what there was to do in
Toronto for personal touristing reasons (people often come a few days early or
stay a few days late to YAPCs in order just to see the sights). What he found
was that there was just plain too much to do in Toronto, and he got excited
about experiencing the city as a whole. This is actually something that the
TPM group wanted to accomplish in hosting a YAPC. Toronto is one of the great
urban environments of North America (on the scale of San Francisco or Chicago)
and YAPC is being held right in the heart of downtown. We're happy and proud
for an opportunity to share the city with all the people who are coming in
from afar to visit, especially people who haven't been before.

So Kevin made the suggestion, and I thought it was a great idea. At the
next TPM meeting I mentioned it to the whole group and everyone seemed really
pleased with it. Basically, we'll divide up the conference attendees into
groups of 10 and send people out into the city with their digicams to track
down and photograph local landmarks and places of geek-interest. This will
happen on the night of Monday 27 June. The winners will be announced...

... on Tuesday night, which will be the night of the social centerpiece of
YAPC. For those who don't know their geography (or don't happen to have a map
handy), Toronto is situated on the north shore of Lake Ontario. Lake Ontario
is one of the Great Lakes, which means it's big. Really big. More of an
inland sea than a lake. Tuesday night, we're taking a cruise. We've booked a
major cruise ship to hold the entire conference, and for 4 hours it will
navigate Toronto Harbor, the channels through the Toronto Islands, and the
near coast of Lake Ontario. I've done this kind of cruise once before; it
makes for a great combination of natural and urban beauty. (The Toronto
skyline is one of the most impressive in the world, and it looks great from
the lake as day turns to night.) We're also going to be having our
banquet dinner on the cruise boat, and our fundraising auction. (There will
be some special items to be had during the auction as well. They are sure to
raise eyebrows.)

There will be happenings before the conference officially begins, too. Uri
Guttman (of Boston.pm) is the official YAPC 'socialist czar', and he's
arranging for a group restaurant dinner for anyone who arrives to the
conference on Sunday (which should be almost everyone from out of town) and
he's also trying to book a movie theatre in the downtown area for our
exclusive use to see something, we're not quite sure what yet. (What are the big
sci-fi films to be released towards the end of June?) We're still looking for
sponsorship for this.

Though neither social nor officially part of the conference, the
'lambdacamels' will descend upon Toronto, too. This is the group led by
Autrijus Tang, founder of the Pugs project. Pugs is an effort to implement
Perl 6 in Haskell as a kind of proof-of-concept for the real Perl 6 (which
will run on Parrot), as well as to give Larry a working Perl 6 example through
which he can focus on the details in the Perl 6 language design. About a
dozen Pugs hackers will show up in Toronto nearly a week before the conference
happens, and then be whisked away to a wilderness hideaway where they will do
nothing but hack on Pugs for several days before the conference starts. (We
have a lot of wilderness in Canada, even near Toronto, and one of the
Toronto Mongers has a large cottage where he'll house the whole gang.)

From time to time we will throw them scraps of food. If we are pleased
with the results, we'll drive them back to civilization in time for the
conference.

How did you go about wrangling sponsors?

RD: I'd say it was a three-edged sword.

Yours, mine, and the truth?

RD: You do not understand, but you will.

All 3 edges have something to do with simply being networked into various
IT communities. The least of the 3 was me needing sponsors and flipping
through my Rolodex. (Well, Palm Pilot, but same idea.) The first--and crucial--sponsor
came as a result of my being active in CLUE, the Canadian
Linux Users Exchange. It is an organization that attempts to act as a
clearing-house for Linux community activities around Canada. The head of that
organization, Matt Rice, is a big Perl programmer and advocate as well. And
he is also closely connected with the people at LPI, the Linux Professional
Institute.

So one day Matt and I were talking, and I told him how I was mustering
TPM to make a YAPC bid. This was in July 2004, making it the 2nd bid that TPM
would make for YAPC, as we lost the 2003 bid to Buffalo. Buffalo did a great
job, and I was happy to have lost to them after I went to YAPC::NA 2004 there
and saw the quality of their event. One of the really big things that they had
going for them was that the CompSci department at SUNY Buffalo
donated the entire venue to them, gratis. They just had a new building built
on campus and they were eager for an opportunity to showcase it.
This, plus a desire on the part of the chairman of the CS department there to
'give back' to the open source community in general (and the Perl community in
specific) led to the donation of their new building as a venue. It's a
really nice building. We were very fortunate to have had it for the
conference.

Did this happen before TPF accepted the proposal or after?

RD: It was part of the 2004 bid that Buffalo.pm submitted
to TPF in August 2003. As a member of the Perl community, I was really happy
with the donation from the CS department there and how it made for a great YAPC.
As a losing bidder for YAPC::NA 2004, though, I felt differently. (Like I
said, I'm glad that they did [win]. You can't look that kind of gift horse in the
mouth.)

I felt like I had a trump card played against me. We put a lot into our
2004 bid, and yet there was no argument I could make that would have changed
the outcome, or should have changed the outcome.

So I felt vulnerable when it came to creating a bid in the summer of 2004
for 2005. Like, no matter how hard I worked, someone else could produce the
same magical trump and we would be shut out. So I made finding that same
trump card myself to put into the Toronto bid my first order of business. I
explained it this way to Matt, and he brought it to some people at LPI, and
they realized the value of supporting a great open source community like the
Perl community, and they essentially committed to a sponsorship large enough
that our venue requirements would be covered.

So LPI became the foundation sponsor of YAPC::NA 2005 in Toronto. I
honestly can't imagine how I would have made the conference work without
them.

How much of the previous bid did you re-use?

RD: Much of it. We cleaned it up a bit, and added
"options" to it. In the previous year I identified one potential venue to put
into the bid. For the 2005 bid, I kept that one but added another, in case
TPF found one or the other preferable. But the main addition to the bid was
the LPI sponsorship. To compare the work effort of the two bids, I'd say that
the bid we put together in the summer of 2003 took about a dozen of us about
2.5 weeks to put together, in our off-hours, using a Kwiki. (That was when I
first appreciated just how useful wikis can be in collaborative documentation
development tasks!)

The bid in 2004, I assembled myself in about 2 days. (Not including the
effort of finding the LPI sponsorship or in 'scouting out' the venue
possibilities.)

Having potential venues and a real sponsor must have helped.

RD: I don't know if the 2005 bid benefited from having two
venue possibilities as opposed to one, but it certainly benefited from having
the foundational sponsorship of LPI.

How about the rest of the sponsors?

RD: So I've covered two edges of the sword. The third edge
is by random chance. Although it must be said that chance favors the
prepared mind.

In September 2004 there was a PHP conference happening in Toronto, and I kept
up a degree of correspondence with the producer of that conference, Marco
Tabini. (This was as part of the work I was doing for CLUE, which was making
myself aware of open source events happening in Canada.) The day that
conference was to wrap up, I eked some time out of work and went over
to the conference venue to congratulate Marco on his conference. So we
finally met in person there, and he invited me to stay and join him for lunch.
I did... and promptly got separated from him and the rest of his core group in
the buffet line.

So after I got my food, I went to whatever other random table appeared to
have a free seat and I got into conversation with the rest of the table.
At one point during conversation at the table one of the guys there
asked us all what we thought of DB2 (the IBM database product). About
a year earlier I had worked with it in a Perl project and I had had a hell of a
time, so I heaped a bit of good-natured scorn upon it, mostly having to
do with how difficult it was to integrate with Perl. After a few minutes of
ranting I asked him why he asked. The reason was because he was the Product
Manager for DB2 and Open Source Software at IBM. ($name = 'Dan
Scott')

Moral: ask before ranting, unless you're the kind of person who asks
and then doesn't rant.

RD: Fortunately, Dan is one of those people who takes
criticism constructively! :-) He was really happy to hear that I had an
opinion on Perl and DB2, and he wanted to get together with me to get down my
thoughts in a more organized fashion, so that he could direct some resources
within IBM toward addressing those concerns. So we made an appointment to do
that. And then I mentioned to him that there was this YAPC thing that had
just recently been awarded to Toronto, and maybe IBM would like to help out
with that too. Actually, this may have been a few days before the official
announcement that Toronto.pm had been awarded YAPC, but Kevin Meltzer and I
had talked informally about it before that.

So anyhow, Dan was receptive to the idea, and he put me in touch with the
right people at IBM for this kind of thing. It took a few months to move its
way through the process there, but with the help of some great sympathetic
people at IBM they came through with a tremendous sponsorship, which is how we
are able to have the cruise/banquet I told you about earlier. To summarize:
direct networking, Rolodex, and random. (The latter two being manifestations of
indirect networking, I suppose).

This covers my sponsorship efforts. Since then I have deputized a few
people at TPM to try to find some more. That is in process but they've had
some promising responses so far.

Is the goal of a YAPC to be self-sufficient or to make a bit of
money?

RD: The goal is to be self-sufficient. As I understand
it, there is no official TPF position that YAPC should create a surplus that
can go back to TPF to help it fund its other goals.

That said, the previous few YAPCs have had surpluses, though not huge ones.
I really don't know if YAPC::NA 2005 in Toronto will or won't this year.

Thus every new sponsor you find can fund some other neat thing, like a
movie trip or the cruise?

RD: Yes, that's exactly correct. As I mentioned earlier,
we're still hoping to find a sponsor for the movie night that Uri is
organizing. Sometimes sponsorship money won't be used for "fun" or
"conference enhancing" items. For instance, I really don't know whether or
not I can provide my conference volunteers with free admission to the
conference. I need to find maybe $2000 in order just to cover their variable
food costs.

A conference without volunteers definitely counts as "not fun" in my
book.

RD: Oh, we'll have volunteers. It's just that, as things stand
right now, they'll pay their conference fee just like everyone else. I've
paid my conference fee. Many others on the volunteer side of things have
already, too. It's like that bit in "Starship Troopers": In Raczak's
Roughnecks, everyone jumps, everyone fights!

What were you looking for when you and your team put together the
schedule this year?

RD: We kind of didn't know what we were looking for, at
first. The call-for-papers (CFP) went active on January 24, I think. Up until maybe three
days before the close of CFP (April 18), we had paper submissions totaling
maybe only 75% of what was needed to fill the conference, even if we stretched
some of the talks out. When the CFP ended, we were up to maybe 250% of what
was needed to fill the conference. Yes, there were a LOT of last minute
submissions.

I can't manage to feel any surprise!

RD: No, I don't blame you.

But there's a huge difference between being an impassionate outside
observer, and being the poor schmuck who won't know whether or not their life
has meaning until the CFP totals are in in another couple of days. I was
pretty tense leading up to that.

It was pretty obvious to us that there would be certain "tracks"
that would form in the conference: Perl 6 and testing were the two big ones.
The process of putting together the schedule went something like this:

Pick out the very few "absolute-must-have" talks from the stack.

Find a time for them in the utterly empty schedule.

Now, figure out the talks which thematically support those talks.

If there are too many for those themes, then figure out if any of those
overlap, and pick one of the overlapping.

And now cut the list down by another talk or two, somehow.

So now we have our anchors, and our tracks. That left us with only so much
schedule left to fill, and way too many talks to do it with. So we (the
program selection committee) went into a kind of frenzied scrum for about two
hours with back-and-forth advocating of personal favorites. When the dust
cleared, we had our schedule.

I should say that all of this happened on Saturday, April 23, when six of us
got together and spent the whole day working through the schedule.

Did you notice other trends>

RD: Other trends... hmm... well, we have a database track,
more or less, which is heavily influenced by Class::DBI. Apart from that, I
don't know if there is anything we can call a trend, but I can point out a few
other features of the schedule.

The opening 1.5 hours of the first day is a plenary session--a bit of time
for Toronto.pm to welcome everyone who came (and we've got people coming from
all over the world!), followed by Larry giving a keynote, followed by Allison
giving her "state of the carrot" update on the world of Perl over the past
year. The afternoon of day three will be much as it has been the past few years;
the Lightning Talks, followed by a closing keynote, followed by a Town Hall
meeting.

One interesting thing that happened with the schedule that I was expecting
is that, in day two, we are actually going to bump up the number of parallel
tracks from three to four, which I think is a first for a YAPC::NA. This is to
accommodate a "donated tutorial" from Stonehenge that brian d foy,
Stonehenge trainer and originator of the Perl Monger movement, will present.
We haven't yet identified the room at the conference venue that we will book for
him, so we've been calling it the "brian d foyer". We're all just
way too pleased with ourselves for that. Even once we have figured out a room,
no doubt that name will stick.

We thought it was important to put this tutorial into the schedule so that
newcomers to Perl would have something meaningful at the conference to cater
to their needs. This was raised at the Town Hall meeting in Buffalo at the
end of YAPC::NA 2004 and so we're trying to take those comments to heart. It
has meant finding more money to book the extra room, but we all thought it was
important enough to make the stretch to do this.

Do you expect a lot of newcomers? I didn't really catch the breakdown
between experienced programmers and neophytes at the last couple of
YAPCs.

RD: I wish I was in a better position to answer that.
Almost by definition it's hard to predict, as these people don't circulate in
the same communication channels that I do. I talked with brian d
foy about what his expectations were in terms of the number of people who would
attend his introductory Perl tutorial at YAPC, and he said that when he has
given similar talks at similar conferences he's always had a good turn out.

That's as close I can get to knowing, I'm afraid. As for previous YAPCs,
well, what I recall from Buffalo was that the newcomers were certainly vocal
in the Town Hall meeting. That's a good thing! I absolutely hate the idea
that the Perl community could degenerate into an echo chamber. New
perspectives are necessary.

How is registration going?

RD: Just a second...I'll have a look....

Wow! This was the first time I looked today--seven new since yesterday.
Which is huge. It could be the biggest single day jump yet. The total is
106. Which is considerably ahead of any previous YAPC::NAs I have
any data for this number of days before the conference starts.
(T-minus-YAPC, as it were.)

My data set goes back to YAPC::NA 2002 in St. Louis. 1999 - 2001, I don't
know. Maybe the information is out there somewhere within TPF, but I haven't
figured out where yet. Right now, my projection for registrants + speakers +
volunteers is between 300 and 400.

Do you have access to a lot of that through previous
organizers?

RD: Only going back to 2002. I think that's when TPF
instituted a new back-end data system.

How many speakers and volunteers do you estimate will be there?

RD: Speakers, I don't have to estimate--the number is 45.
(Not including Lightning Talks.) Volunteers--maybe 20? 25? We're in low
teens now, and there's a lot of buzz within the larger TPM group so I expect a
lot of people will offer their time for the actual conference duration.

Regarding the range, my actual projections are for 340 right now. 300 is
being conservative, assuming we lose quite a lot of momentum. My gut tells me
that we're actually going to gain a fair bit more. 400 would be a blow-out
success.

How many can the venue hold?

RD: The venue can hold 420 before I start getting the
facility manager to start lining chairs up against the walls. More
importantly, the cruise boat can hold 500. :-) While this is all going by gut,
I think we'll be around the 400 total mark. Maybe I'm being influenced by the
seven registrants today. Earlier this weekend there was a day when there wasn't a
single registrant. That doesn't happen often. Maybe had you asked me on that
day I wouldn't have been so optimistic.

How about the hotel and the dorms?

RD:Ahh....there's the rub.

Right now, I have 250 rooms reserved in the same hotel facility that is
hosting the conference. I have 100 rooms reserved in a university dorm about
1km away from the conference, for students or other people who are
particularly cost-conscious. I also have 50 rooms reserved in a hotel that is
part of the same university that has the dorm rooms, so that's also about 1km
away from the conference facility. So, we have plenty for the whole
conference.

But...

The group reservation for the 250 rooms at the hotel facility expires on
May 12. At that point, any unbooked rooms go back on the open market.
They're still bookable with the conference code, but they just aren't
reserved for us. So they'll probably be sold to the public with a
half-life of 4 days.

Toronto is notoriously under-served by hotels, and compounding this is that
AA is having its 75th anniversary conference in Toronto on June 30th and July
1. That conference is bringing 79,000 people into the city. The 'thin tail'
of AA conference attendees who want to come to Toronto a bit early to do some
touristing before their conference starts will put a great deal of
strain on the hotel availability in the city.

We call that the long snout. Or the short snout, I forget.

RD: Right! That's a better term. I was wondering what to
call it.

Looking at things from the opposite direction, YAPC attendees who decide at
the last minute that they want to spend a few extra days in Toronto after the
conference ends will be S.O.L. trying to find a hotel. So I'm concerned about
all this.

Looking at the registration figures from the previous few years of YAPCs,
about 40% of attendees register in the last 2.5 weeks. So for YAPC this year,
that would mean 40% registering June 6 and after. There will still be a few
rooms left in the dorms and the hotel attached to the university that contains
the dorms (our booking arrangements are slightly different with them), but
still, there will be a distinct shortage of hotel rooms.

Anything else to say in closing?

RD: YAPC is the Perl conference by Perl programmers, for
Perl programmers (and people who think they might like to be Perl
programmers). Everyone in the Toronto.pm organizing team is doing it because
we all feel so fortunate for all the support we have received from our fellow
Perl Mongers around the world, and we feel privileged to return the generosity
as best we can through the conference.

We hope you can join us in Toronto for the conference, and we're hoping to
make it a memorable one for everyone.